Establish Training and Documentation Maintenance Plan

Use

The purpose of this task is to develop the plan for identifying and transferring knowledge both in the short term prior to implementation and in the long term for maintenance and support. Begin to develop a long term ongoing knowledge management plan.

Procedure

  1. Identify knowledge requirements of the development team.
  2. The knowledge requirements fall into two categories: implementation knowledge and prerequisite knowledge.

    Implementation knowledge requirements include: access to SAP, access to business process requirements or change management teams, LAN and Intranet, access to Business Process Procedures (BPPs) and implementation team members.

    Business Process Procedures (BPPs) can be downloaded from SAPNet. Please follow the link provided below.

    Prerequisite knowledge requirements include: business processes, background, industry background, SAP, development tools, instructional design, technical writing, interview skills, and management skills. See end user training and documentation roles and responsibilities for additional skill-set requirements.

  3. Identify who will be maintaining end user content once it has been created and the development team disbanded.
  4. It is not necessary to identify actual personnel but it is critical to consider how the content will be maintained, and to put in place a structure or job definition for maintenance.

  5. Identify knowledge requirements of end user training content and documentation maintenance team.
  6. Assess how they will acquire the knowledge.

    The maintenance team is most often significantly smaller than the development team. Their role is to ensure that all the training content and documentation materials remain current and easily available for ongoing training requirements such as, new hire training.

    Identify the steps by which they will acquire the knowledge to maintain the content. It is recommended that they be trained both on maintaining the content and on the methodology behind creating it. In addition, time should be allocated to create this hand-over training and the creation of a maintenance document detailing step by step how to update it. Sign-off and hand over should be covered during the post go live support.

  7. Work with key stakeholder and project manager to ensure long term needs are satisfied through a knowledge management plan.

Knowledge management is a critical factor for success in any implementation, as well as for ongoing day-to-day business. It is a continuous, progressive process that requires flexible solutions to meet the needs of diverse organizations.

Plan now for additional training after go live. Consider broadening the scope of your users’ knowledge by conducting workshops to educate more on the integration among the business processes, impact, etc. These items are not covered in the just-in-time training.

Successful knowledge management benefits include:

Result

This task is complete when a plan is designed to identify ongoing maintenance requirements for training and documentation and knowledge management.

Time and resources must be allocated to creating and implementing the maintenance plan. Do not leave this task until the last weeks of the project, as time will not be available.